How to Become a Hacker Why This Document?

How To Become A Hacker Why This Document? As editor of the Jargon File, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizard hacker?". Oddly enough there don't seem to be any FAQs or Web documents that address this vital question, so here's mine. If you are reading a snapshot of this document offline, the current version lives at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html. What Is A Hacker? The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term 'hacker', most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant. There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture